Martha shares an email from a longtime listener, Lois Teeslink of Vista, California, about a favorite childhood librarian. This is part of a complete episode.
Greetings, Murphys and Melvins and wedgies, oh my! In this week’s archive episode, we talk about these and other terms for that cruel prank that involves a yank. Also, funny Facebook groups for grammar lovers, the difference between...
In this episode, Martha and Grant honor winners of the Ig Nobel Prizes, those wacky awards for weird academic research, and they help a caller decipher a puzzling word from a personals ad: what does paratereseomaniac mean?
mis lit n.— «Nowadays, there is a mania for memoirs, and in fact there are so many of them that they have come to be called in some quarters “mis lit” (misery literature).» —“Larry McMurtry on Cormac, Heaven’s Gate, and...
You may have learned that an estuary is where a river meets the sea, but a reference librarian asks whether she should eschew estuary as a word for the confluence of freshwater bodies. Martha and Grant tide her over with some more information. This...
data smog n.— «She said most of her peers don’t know where to turn on the Internet besides free search engines. “It’s complicated,” she said. The Association of College and Research Librarians refers to it as “data smog.” Students deal...